Smoking and Sadness

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences highlights the link between emotions and addiction, and contains significant implications for substance abuse intervention.

The research suggests that self-reported sadness is linked to both higher rates of smoking and smoking relapses. In one of the studies, participants saw videos designed to evoke sadness, disgust, or no emotional at all. People who saw the sad video were more impatient to smoke and also inhaled more smoke with each puff.

The lead researcher, Charles Dorison from Harvard, says, “The conventional wisdom in the field was that any type of negative feelings, whether it's anger, disgust, stress, sadness, fear, or shame, would make individuals more likely to use an addictive drug. Our work suggests that the reality is much more nuanced…We find that sadness appears to be an especially potent trigger of addictive substance abuse.”

Nearly 500,000 people in the US, alone, die each year from smoking-related illnesses. Perhaps this work suggests emotion-based interventions designed to moderate feelings of sadness or to provide alternative ways of working through sadness could be a step toward changing smokers’ behavior. It may also open the doors for similar research into other forms of addiction or undesirable behavior.